The present invention relates generally to methods, systems and apparatus for interacting with computers.
The invention has been developed primarily to allow a large number of distributed users to interact with networked information via printed matter and optical sensors, thereby to obtain interactive printed matter on demand via high-speed networked color printers. Although the invention will largely be described herein with reference to this use, it will be appreciated that the invention is not limited to use in this field.
Multicast is a network transmission technique whereby a single message can be addressed to a distributed group of receivers without the sender""s explicit knowledge of the membership of the group. The message is efficiently transmitted to all receivers, traversing any given network link at most once. Unlike broadcast which transmits a message to all receivers, multicast only transmits the message to receivers in the corresponding multicast group.
It is an object of the present invention to apply advantages of multicast to the distribution of documents.
According to the present invention, there is provided a method of distributing a plurality of documents, via a communications network, to a plurality of receiving stations, the method including the steps of:
transmitting, via the communications network at least one document layout to each of the plurality of receiving stations, the at least one document layout defining one of the plurality of documents and identifying at least one data object and at least one channel on which the at least one data object will be multicast; and
multicasting on said at least one channel, via the communications network, the at least one data object, such that each of the plurality of receiving stations receives the at least one data object identified by the at least one document layout previously received by the receiving station.
Preferably, the method further includes the step of, at each receiving station, merging the at least one data object with the at least one layout, thereby to produce the corresponding one of the plurality of document.
In a preferred form, at least one of the receiving stations includes a printer, and the method further including the step of printing the corresponding one of the plurality of documents using the printer.
Preferably, at least some of the printers are connected directly to the communications network, the method including the step of automatically printing the respective received documents using the directly connected printers.
Preferably, the data objects include one or more of the following:
text;
graphics; and
images.
Other aspects and objects of the invention will be apparent from reading the following detailed description.